Teen Girls and the Trans Craze
Tsunami Damage Close to Home
At the end of this month, I will have the opportunity to speak at the Apex Ministry Youth Conference on the subject of identity and sexuality. I’m grateful, excited, and, uh, a bit nervous.
Uppermost on my mind is the issue of gender dysphoria and transitioning. Our culture has changed so very rapidly and I don’t want to lose my audience by being out of touch. But truly more and more families are being hit with this.
I’ve read a good bit of Mark Yarhouse’s work on identity, which is absolutely solid, if not a bit difficult to wade through. But I picked up a tremendous book which has opened my eyes to another huge swath of sexual tsunami victims: adolescent girls.
Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters was penned by Wall Street Journal writer Abigail Shrier. An opinion piece she published in January 2019 titled “When Your Daughter Defies Biology” received an outpouring of feedback. Though she never intending to write a book, the stir created by her frank opinion caught her off guard, causing her to reach out for input from transitioners, detransitioners, parents and proponents.
She interviewed several hundred transitioners, and spoke with nearly 50 families. What she found was incredibly troubling.
Research before 2012 had revealed that the percentage of those diagnosed with gender dysphoria was 0.01%, and almost all of them were boys. Symptoms began to emerge between ages two and four, and in 70% of the cases, the feelings resolved themselves by adulthood. Yep, 70%!
But numbers began to skyrocket among adolescent girls around 2010. In all of the cases that Shrier investigated, parents saw little or no evidence of dysphoria in their daughters during childhood. There was the occasional tomboy, but not little girls who refused behaviors characteristic of girls their age.
About that same time, many abnormalities began to arise for all teens. Suicidality increased 25% between 2009 and 2017. Depression grew 37%, with girls accounting for by far most of that increase. For girls, self-harm spiked 62%. Incredible.
So what happened? Shrier concluded that the correlation with the rise of smartphone usage was too blatant to ignore.
Reflecting on her own teen years, Shrier noted that very few of the high school girls were “hot”. And for those who made that grade, their imperfections were absolutely obvious.
Not so with the ubiquitous celebrity images online and the photoshopped pics of friends on social media. And while girls have always been prone to comparing themselves with others, Facebook and other aps have taken it to new lows. A nervous teen will put her best pic out there, and then anxiously wait to see how many “Likes” she gets. For some, the results are crushing.
Add to this the increased isolation and loneliness. Not only are teens’ noses glued to their phones, but helicopter parents are guarding kids more closely. Fewer girls cruise our malls these days, checking out the guys. (Guess that makes it easier for us geriatrics who need a place to walk in the winter!)
But isolated teens do cruise the internet and are checking out numerous sites which encourage them to connect dots between their increased anxiety and supposed gender dysphoria. One of the mantras on such sites is this: “If you think you might be trans, then you are!”
The stories in this book are absolutely heartbreaking. The grieving parents in early chapters are not Trump supporters with gunracks in their pickups. One couple was very progressive, with the mom involved in her local PFLAG organization. Another was a lesbian couple. All were baffled and horrified at the changes which came over their daughters. Any suggestions made for them to reconsider were dismissed with contempt. With tears, these parents watch their girls go through treatments and eventual “top surgery” to remove unwanted breasts.
Again, these were girls who gave no evidence of dysphoria while children.
One counselor was quoted as saying, “A common response that I get from female clients is something along these lines: ‘I don’t know exactly that I want to be a guy. I just know I don’t want to be a girl.’ ”[i]
Of course, there is a constellation of contributing factors which have enabled this craze. Shrier lists the following:
Whether or not you have an adolescent daughter, whether or not your child has fallen for this transgender craze, America has become fertile ground for this mass enthusiasm for reasons that have everything to do with our cultural frailty: parents are undermined; experts are over–relied upon; dissenters in science and medicine are intimidated; free speech truckles under renewed attack; government healthcare laws harbor hidden consequences; and an intersectional era has arisen in which the desire to escape a dominant identity encourages individuals to take cover in victim groups.[ii]
Next week I will go further with the discoveries in this book and have us consider how we as pastors, counselors, and Christian leaders can respond to this craze. May God enable us to see with his eyes what is going on under the surface for our troubled teens.
[i]Irreversible Damage, p. 7.[ii]Irreversible Damage, p. xxiii
I think that gender dysphoria does exist as a legitimate phenomenon. However, I do agree that kids can be confused by social media as well. I try to let kids know that their pre-frontal cortex isn't totally on board until about age 25. So, it would be a mistake to make too many identity decisions before that milestone is reached. So, I do wish that surgeries would be delayed, although I know that opinion is not popular among my more progressive acquaintances. It's up to you how you approach it, but I would probably not suggest that gender dysphoria doesn't happen. I might just suggest that any big decisions be put off until one can be totally certain. I know a young man who told my daughter, when they were both about 5 years old, that a spider bit him and made him a boy and a girl at the same time. That young man never abandoned his belief that he is actually a girl, despite his family's desperate attempts to "cast the demon out of him." So, the young man and his family both just ended up angry and distanced. But I do agree with you that it would be unwise to let a young person have irreversible surgery until much later. Perhaps a new hair cut or a change in wardrobe might be enough to allow their feelings to be valued without doing anything irreversible.